We were lucky to catch up with Elise Conley recently and have shared our conversation below.

Elise, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

I first came up with the idea for the Cookin’ with Booze Newsletter as a place for me to showcase more in-depth content about the Charleston food scene that didn’t quite fit in my social media channels (@cookinwithbooze on Instagram and TikTok). I started my Instagram back in 2016 when I was a junior at the College of Charleston and writing for Spoon University. It started out as (now cringey) food puns and highly filtered photos, and I am so glad the focus has shifted to video. Videos provide more of an opportunity for storytelling, which is what I’m best at. Since then, I have grown my channels to 25.8k+ followers on Instagram and 26.5k+ followers on TikTok.

I wanted to become the go-to source of information when it came to the Charleston food scene, so in 2022, I spent a lot of time making in-depth event roundup videos each month. When they weren’t shown to my followers as much as I would like, I decided to take matters into my own hands. After all, social media is rented space, so I wanted to create something of my own with a more engaged audience. Since I had established myself as an expert in this area and already had an online community, I was hopeful that at least a few people would sign up!

It started out as a weekly paid newsletter that included an event roundup, happy hour of the week, hidden gem of the week, restaurant roundups, and a discount to a local restaurant. After a few months, I discovered that the discounts weren’t really being used. In order to create a sense of community, I started doing monthly meetups where my subscribers and I would gather at the restaurant and use the discount together. This quickly became my favorite part of the newsletter because I was facilitating friendships and meeting a lot of fun people myself.

Making friends as an adult is not easy, so I was excited to create a space for people to do so without having to spend a ton of money (my subscription is only $5 a month). The best part of this community is that everyone has the same goals: supporting local restaurants, meeting new people, and having fun while doing so! I started doing the meetups in May 2023 and 4 people showed up to my first one. Fast forward to now and I have over 120 subscribers and I just threw a holiday party with 50 people, plus a wait list.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I discovered my passion for food writing/food in general when I joined Spoon University at the College of Charleston in 2015. If you haven’t heard of Spoon University, it’s a platform for college students to provide cooking tips, comment on the latest trends, and more. I had just learned about the “flow state” in my psychology classes and realized that’s exactly what was happening when I was formulating and writing articles. Before I went to sleep at night, my head was always buzzing with ideas for my next article and I just had to jot them down.

After a few months at the CofC chapter of Spoon University, I was selected to be Managing Editor and also participate in a summer internship where I had to write at least 5 articles per week about trending topics. For some of the articles, you had to submit original photos, ideally with a DSLR camera. I would borrow my roommate at the time’s camera for assignments, which sparked an interest in photography. I started posting the photos on Instagram and eventually got a camera of my own as a graduation present.

After graduation, all I knew was that I wanted to continue writing about food. I got a job at a local restaurant in the meantime to really immerse myself in the industry (and to pay the bills of course). I worked mornings, so in the afternoons, I was able to pursue my passion for food writing. I got more involved in the local food scene by writing for a few publications like Charleston City Paper and Charleston Living Magazine. I was also active on Yelp and attended a few foodie events around town, which eventually led to me becoming their social media manager for a few years. When COVID hit in 2020, I was laid off from that position, and found another social media opportunity with a start up app, Whim Social. During this time, TikTok was booming, so I would make fun videos for Whim’s account about different Charleston tropes, and we had a great response. We also required videos to have voice overs on the app, which is where my storytelling came in. I took a lot of the skills I learned from that job and applied them to my own channels.

There are a lot of food creators in Charleston, but what sets me apart is my knowledge of the industry and my storytelling. I have lived here for over a decade, so I have made a lot of connections in the food scene over the years and have interviewed a lot of chefs for various articles. My videos are in-depth recaps of my experience at a restaurant and I also like to include information about the people behind the restaurant. Social media users are also craving authenticity and want to connect with the person behind the camera, so I make sure to showcase my personality in each video as well. My goal is to inspire people to support these local businesses and inform them about what makes them special. There are a lot of restaurants in Charleston, so I help people decide on the best spot for their weekly date night, special occasion, or just a casual night out with friends.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I started back in the dark ages of Instagram (2016) when it was just photos (the horror!). At that time, the main focus was taking high quality photos and pairing it with a clever caption. Everyone was walking around with real cameras, it was a wild time! I didn’t have a lot of strategy with my posts, I was just taking pictures and posting what I thought looked best (with a witty caption of course). Although Instagram has changed a lot since then, the constant in my journey has been staying true to myself. Scrolling back through my feed, I can see my personality shining through in every post. Authenticity really is the key to success in the perfectly manicured world of social media. If you stay true to yourself, the followers will come!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Like many other people, 2020 was a year that required a lot of resilience. I was laid off from my part-time dream job of organizing events and running the social media for Yelp Charleston, and managing the restaurant I had worked at for 3 years was becoming increasingly miserable by the day. I could no longer participate in my favorite activity (going out to restaurants) so I was really at a loss. I had pretty much abandoned my own Instagram account because I was too busy running Yelp’s, until the COVID lockdown. The only thing that kept my now husband and I sane was trying random, time-consuming recipes that we would never attempt in normal circumstances. I would throw these cooking adventures up on Instagram stories and people seemed to like watching us fumble around the kitchen (after a few drinks of course). We made homemade ravioli that was so thick it was basically inedible, but at least we had a good laugh about it. I rediscovered my appreciation of Instagram as a creative outlet – rather than a job – during this time and was really able to focus on building my own audience rather than someone else’s.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://cookinwithbooze.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cookinwithbooze/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elise-conley-23b111a8/
• Other: Newsletter: https://cookin-with-booze.ck.page/products/cookin-with-booze-newsletter
  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cookinwithbooze?_t=8YAkTTn7lWt&_r=1

Image Credits

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